John Bel Edwards is likely not able to be replicated
Edwards won a convincing victory in Louisiana in December of 2015 (note the month). Edwards win was a perfect storm. Vitter was a dreadful candidate, Jindal ran the state into the ground, Edwards was a great candidate for the state, and Democrats were able to concentrate all resources on that race as it was literally the only race in the country going on. With all of that he won. Would he have won a Senate race if the Senate was closely divided? Likely no, even against Vitter (Vitter won the first race he ran after the madam scandal which was for the Senate in 2010). We are running a similar candidate in Alabama. He will likely run against a man who got removed from being Chief Justice for violating the law and who is exceptionally extreme. Doug Jones is pro choice but otherwise he is similar to Edwards. The GOP will have a flawed candidate but he likely won't win anyway (nor would a pro life Jones win). On rare occasion we will win a governorship in a place like Louisiana, Alabama or South Carolina if the GOP nominates a terrible candidate, we nominate a great one, and we decide to throw a ton of resources. We won't win senate seats in those state pretty much no matter what. We can win such races in Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, in a few years Texas, Arizona but won't need or want clones of Edwards to do so. Cooper won in NC running a campaign that was explicitly liberal on social issues and likely won because of them. HB2, which was explicitly a social issue, was front and center in Cooper's campaign. Similarly in VA, we won the top three offices with explicitly liberal campaigns on the social issues. We are winning in the south but in states which have become less southern while losing in those that have become more southern. Edwards was a good candidate for a very southern state and even then we needed help to get over the line. Cooper and McCauliffe were good candidates for less southern states, they are the future of the states we can win in the future.
